I was meant to be a brand name

I went to Home Depot today to pick up my supplies for my work in repairing the drywall in my garage. I had ordered the stuff eight days ago. When I ordered all but one item was listed as in stock at the store. That one item arrived at the store before the in stock stuff was assembled – at least according to my online account.

I waited outside for 20 minutes because they were allowing only so many people into the store at once. Once in I went to the customer service desk. They handed me the piece that had arrived. I asked about the rest. It took a while for the associate to find it. She didn’t have to assemble the order because a couple of the items had my name on them. So someone had gathered the stuff, but didn’t tell the website. But there was one item missing and it took a while to get it. Had someone raided my order as it sat?

From the time I pulled into the parking lot until I pulled out was about 50 minutes. Given the circumstances, not bad.

Alas, there is a second item missing. I had ordered two electrical plates, one of them was the special order. Today I was told the special order bag contained both plates. It does not. A couple days ago I tried calling the store and each time I was routed to a phone that no one answered. Perhaps I now call the national office. Tomorrow.

From there I went to a big box store for groceries. There was no line even though the place is about the same size as Home Depot. Then onward to the medium size specialty grocery store. They had a sign that only 50 people were allowed in at any one time. But nobody was checking the entrance. I also doubt there were 50 people inside. I got what I needed and went on to the small store. This had a big line and I didn’t want to wait again, so I skipped it.



Instead of more virus news today I’m going back to Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man. A week ago I wrote about men at work, contrasting the Long Beach Naval Shipyard with McDonnell Douglas. This time I’ll look at sexual dominance.

This chapter deals with men who were the sons of the McDonnell Douglas workers and of similar age, late teens and early 20s at the time. Again, there are two contrasting groups. The first group is the young men who were in the Spur Posse scandal. The second were the cadets at the Citadel, an all male school with a military feel at the time they were forced to admit the first female cadet.

The young men of Lakewood, California watched their fathers being laid off from the various aerospace companies and not finding work. A big question for them is, so what do I have to look forward to? Menial jobs? Some of them formed the Spur Posse, which had a point system – a point for each different woman they had sex with. Some of it was consensual, some of it was assault.

Even as they were asserting their dominance over women they though they were the victims. They were afraid of being accused of rape and the authorities would believe the woman’s story over theirs.

Yes, the #MeToo movement is all about how the men are believed and the women aren’t. However, for the moment we’re looking at it from the male perspective.

Faludi figured out what the boys were really after: fame.

She says it started with the Pop Warner football leagues for kids. The young men who went through that systems say it isn’t so much about how to play football, something to do, as it is how to be – how to stand out, how to get people to notice you, how to get attention.

Meaning the goal of the exercise – the goal of life – is fame.

Media culture, not so different now than the early 1990s, gave these young men a platform for a brief time. The men were upset because they though it would propel them to higher fame. It didn’t. And once back home their sour reputation followed them and finding work became hard.

One of them, Billy, talked to Faludi a few times after her regular interviews. After an encounter with the police he said:

I’d rather be known than be some random nobody. That’s my worse fear, that I’ll die a nothing. I know that can’t happen. I know I was meant to be a brand name. But a very small part of me say, What if nothing happens? What if I’m a common person?
…
You know, everybody says boys control girls, but it’s the other way around. Girls have it a lot easier. They get the jobs easier. Because the jobs now are all about presenting yourself. It’s all presentation. Girls have it made.

We’re in a tough place if the meaning of manhood, the meaning of being human, is becoming a brand.



I won’t repeat the story of Shannon Faulkner’s short and hellish attempt at being the first female cadet at the Citadel. Instead, I’ll focus on what Faludi says about Citadel culture and why Faulkner didn’t last long.

In contrast to the young men of the Spur Posse the cadets of the Citadel did not want fame. They wanted a place where they could avoid the female gaze, where the could be themselves. They said that if women came to the school they would feel ashamed. But about what? Something repellent to public morality? Something perverted in the American male?

What they had behind closed doors was the ability to have an intimate (which doesn’t mean sexual) relationship between men. They were allowed to care for and nurture each other. They were allowed to be a family. They could hug each other. They could care for each other. They could try “feminine” roles without ridicule. But to feel comfortable being intimate society demanded they denounce it at the same time. Thus they they readily denounced any hint as homosexuality. They could experience male intimacy and conceal it at the same time. They made sure their intimacy was shielded from the gaze of women. They felt the strict masculine roles were enforced by women.

In my reading and blogging over the last dozen years I’ve found that enforcement comes from other men, intent on preserving the social hierarchy, not women. But these cadets felt it came from women.

This paragraph caught my attention:

“The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence,” Dr. James Gilligan, the former mental-health director of the Massachusetts prison system, concluded in Violence, a thoughtful consideration of the origins of violent male behavior in America. “The purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride, thus preventing the individual from being overwhelmed by the feeling of shame.” The major source of shame for American men, Gilligan’s examination found, were downward social mobility and unemployment, circumstances that reveal a helpless core, showcasing an emasculating dependency. More generally, he wrote, male shame comes from the suspicion that the world discredits your claim to manhood, finds it useless, even risible. The violent response to this knowledge serves as a kind of tortoiseshell to armor and conceal its vulnerable occupant, a shield to deflect further humiliating internal inspection. It is a reaction to being caught out, exposed as weak and insufficient.

I understand that shame as men not being able to fulfill the place in the hierarchy that society forced them into.

Understanding that shame is important in the current time (the early 1990s when Faludi was researching the book) because graduation from the Citadel no longer automatically opened doors into great jobs and leadership positions as it used to.

Faludi ends the section on the Citidel with talking to the drag queens of a nearby bar, the Treehouse. Nearly all of them had dated cadets. They offer some insights. The cadets have “feminine” tasks they need to perform – laundry, ironing, shoe polishing. But they don’t talk of doing womanly things. They talk about being a whole man. Lownie, one of the queens said the Citadel is a refuge from social expectations:

You don’t have to be a breadwinner. You don’t have to be a leader. You can play backseat. It’s a great relief … You can act like a human being and not have to act like a man.

Faludi wrote:

I found myself imagining what it would be like if the cadets could have adopted from the Treehouse illusionists the art of self-transformation, could have learned to play the gender game without the war game, could have embraced the nurturing camaraderie that they craved, the physical care and domestic intimacy, without compensating shows of belligerence and brutality.